2025-12-11
41 分钟The Economist Quantum physics has turned 100.
Last week on Babbage, we told you all about the ways that this frankly mind-bending idea came to be.
And yet, all the ways it's been useful in building the modern world.
If you heard that episode, you'll know that despite its success,
the quantum world leaves a lot of things unexplained.
Quantum physics is the description for how the tiniest things in the universe behave.
These are subatomic particles, things like electrons and photons.
Everything else, such as tennis balls, people, planets, galaxies and so on,
that's all described by the laws of Isaac Newton's mechanics, classical mechanics.
So as objects get larger from electrons and photons,
the classical world just sort of takes over at some point in size.
Where is that boundary?
And why is there a boundary?
Frankly, these sorts of questions have created a lot of headaches.
For example, quantum objects can be thought of as both waves and particles,
and such objects can't be located in space until they're observed.
And electrons say that's meant to be orbiting an atomic nucleus.
You'd expect it to be somewhere near the nucleus.
But quantum physics tells us that there's a very,
very tiny but real possibility that that electron you're looking for is on the other side of the universe.